BTomTech

This year Dell Tech World was back in person, and it didn’t disappoint. Here’s my take on the big announcements from the week. We’re back and in person! The biggest takeaway after two years of virtual events is, “We are back!” You simply cannot replace the connections made at an in-person event. Each connection may not be powerful by itself, but the collections of connections, and a few individual ones will be. The excitement was palpable in tweets and posts from the event: The power of events like this lies in the community. I was able to interact with so many people, some old friends I haven’t seen in a while, and new friends as well. I’ve missed meeting new friends over the past two years and recognize we have some ground to make up. Multi-Cloud The second biggest takeaway is AWS (Amazon Web Services) getting mainstage mention. Dell is an infrastructure company. It wants to sell you hardware. Yes, it has a robust services portfolio, but no one compares its business model to a hypers

Broadcom has announced it would buy VMware for $60+ billion, sending a shock wave through the vCommunity. After the news broke, based on my social feeds, there were a few positives, but most seemed to question the deal. As the initial reaction has calmed, it has become more balanced but, obviously, there are still a lot of questions. In speaking with VMUG members, it’s clear most are adopting a wait-and-see attitude, while some are bullish about the future. Broadcom, a traditional chipmaker, made the move into software starting with the purchase of CA Technologies (CA) in 2018, and Symantec in 2019. VMware will be Broadcom’s largest software move and continue the diversification of its revenue. This purchase would put Broadcom's hardware versus software revenue split to about 50/50. Some point to the history of the CA and Symantec acquisitions as an indication of what may happen with VMware, but VMware is a much bigger purchase, three times the size of CA ($19B) and six times that